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Saturday, March 13, 2010

Here's an interesting YouTube link to a 3 minute DRC news bulletin on Chinese infrastructure projects being funded under the controversial $3 billion Eximbank loan (originally this was supposed to be two tranches of $3 billion each). Although the report is in Lingala (and a bit of French), the pictures speak volumes. Who is working on these sites? What role do Chinese and Congolese appear to have?

A tip of the hat to Cornell University Ph.D. student Dunia Prince Zongwe, who forwarded this link to me, with the explanation below:

"Briefly, the news report, which was posted on March 1, 2010, recounts the visit of the newly appointed Infrastructure Minister Mr. Fridolin Kasweshi to the various construction sites where Chinese and Congolese workers are working. The new Infrastructure Minister Kasweshi is not new to the job as he was the provincial infrastructure minister in Katanga where he is credited with several achievements in the infrastructure sector.

The news report is from Journal Televise en Lingala Facile (JTLF) (website: http://lingalafacile.com/). JTLF is one of the 50 plus television channels in the Congo. It is a very small channel in the Congo but it has the
advantage of being in Lingala and thus being accessible to almost everybody in Kinshasa, at least those who have both a TV set and electricity.

Indeed, the string Lingala Facile allows a population to understand the information in Lingala, you can see the last post better presented than on the original site by following this link http://http://livetvtopc.info/Category/Lingala easy.